


After Rogue River

by Jenwryn



Category: Jericho (US 2006)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Family, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-05
Updated: 2011-06-05
Packaged: 2017-10-20 03:46:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/208416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenwryn/pseuds/Jenwryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her finger catches; there's a daub of blood beside her nail.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After Rogue River

**Author's Note:**

> AU, one would imagine, simply because I've only seen the first eight episodes of Season 1 (the last I watched was "Rogue River", hence the _totally_ imaginative title). I really like April, though, so couldn't resist the urge to scribble something for her.

The roses are dangerous beneath her fingers. Not sharp, exactly, but bluntly jagged and ready to catch on her skin the moment she lets her mind wander. She breathes in the scent of them, and the summer that hangs in the air around them – fields, dust, and the faint petroleum tang of the generator's exhaust – and tries to concentrate. Thumb, finger, moving along the woody stem; other hand cutting, with medical precision, right where the cuts need to be. Her grandmother had taught her how to prune roses, so many summers ago, back when April had been a girl with plaits so red that the children at school had dubbed her Longstocking. She'd disliked it, at the time, but, looking back, she wishes she could press reverse – not to regain the plaits, but the innocence that had gone with them. The belief in the universe, in something more than the roses before her.

Her finger catches; there's a daub of blood beside her nail. She watches, as it congeals into a bubble of black, stark contrast with the faded colours she's tending. She sucks at her skin, then rubs a thumb over the velvet of an aged petal; truthfully deceptive; brutally honest.

She can smell the makings of lunch, through the screen door of the kitchen. Can hear Gail humming, and talking to herself; contented frustration at something not having been put back where it belongs. April listens, calms, and the baby within in her moves – shifts, as though to hear the better. It makes April start, makes April stand taller, makes April's mind fill with the image of her unborn child putting a tiny hand to a tiny ear; she finds herself laughing into the rosebush. The sound must startle Gail, because there's an answering silence from the house, and then the older woman's humming starts up again; louder, stronger. April thinks – no, April _knows_ – that Gail is going to be wonderful grandmother, and it goes a fair way to assuaging the pain she feels at the loss of her own mother; at the knowledge that her own mother won't be here for her, for this, for the child. But then, Gail has become her second mother, over the years, and April can't decide whether she loves or resents the way the woman has kept her close to her, has not abandoned her, when even the woman's own son has.

Warmth falls heavier around her, the dust rising stronger, and she looks at the dull colours of the curled-up petals. Snip, snip, snip; secure in the weight of the shears in her hand, secure in the shape of the bushes before her, in the feel of the unwatered lawn at her feet. She thinks of what Eric's face will do, when she begins to show – she wonders, whether it will be horror or obligation, resentment or fear. Even within her own imagination, though, she cannot take his beautiful face and make it look pleased. His expressions are becoming a blank to her, anyway, because, if she tries to see them, she will see Mary Bailey instead, and that she cannot do. It isn't that she hates Mary, so much as she hates the fact that somewhere, not so far away, the barkeep is breathing the same air, is beneath this same sunshine. Sometimes, the injustice of it smarts more than the aftermath of bombs.

The garden shears slip from April's fingers, and she jerks in surprise at the drop; has to bend, to pick them up.

The movement brings her back to summer, back to the garden, back to the sound of Gail's voice.

April stands, and roses – leaves and tired roses – tumble to her feet, old colours almost-against the scuffed dullness of her borrowed work boots. Petals spread across the dry lawn like soft glass. Warmth rises. Dry grass sways. In the future, she thinks, she'll be showing her child these same roses; will be listening to Gail teach her child the words to those same songs. And it's good, it's good, it's good, to have somewhere, somewhere, amongst the empty darkness.

Within her, the baby shifts with echoing joy.


End file.
